I am working on introducing my young students to philosophical and political concepts surrounding the question of a just and fair society. I am using the work of John Rawls and Emmanuel Kant to aid my efforts.

Today I asked the group this question:

Which society would you choose:

A.) Everyone can do as they choose if it maximizes the happiness of the society

B.) Everyone can do as they choose provided it benefits the most vulnerable in society

Interestingly, the vote was 8-4 in favour of option A. In other words, the students voted for the utilitarian principle (Jeremy Bentham) as opposed to the difference principle (John Rawls). As we discuss these matters further, I will revisit this question with them.

I am currently weighing John Rawls’ ideas on “justice as fairness” with my own re-envisioning of the history of my native land. I recently read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ collection of essays “We Were Eight Years In Power” and found myself sitting once again with a bedevilling problem, which has long disturbed me: the tension between theory and practice; that distance between the careful and necessary study of ideas, especially ideas about fairness, liberty and equality as first order principles and, frankly, reality: the socio-economic and political realities of race and class, which play such a formative role in the application of fairness, liberty and equality.

I remember so well being confronted with a terrible feeling of inadequacy when I was immersed in graduate studies whereby I felt that my work in history was irrelevant; irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary society. The inadequacy was, I think in hindsight, the result of a flaw in my approach to my research (these things often are). But I have never been able to move away from, or beyond, a terrible sense that the careful examination of first order principles of how a fair and just society is to be constructed are somehow far removed from the historical legacy and the contemporary socio-economic and political -not to mention ecological- realities of the United States (Canada, too). I mention the U.S. specifically as it is my native land and therefore the society I know best.

In the short clip that follows, Noam Chomsky speaks to this dilemma I am facing as I read and re-read Rawls and try and respond to the claims and criticisms Ta-Nehisi Coates has so profoundly drawn together in his essays on the 2009-2017 period in American history (with all of its antecedents).

I am currently working on an exercise for young adults and public school age children that involves exploring “the difference principle” as articulated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. I find this to be an especially interesting exercise as it has me thinking about how to conduct a group activity where each child/young adult has to imagine a society where the social benefits that accrue to those most well off must also improve the position of the worst off or most vulnerable. I am led to what is, for me, the inevitable question:

Do social goods like health care and public education improve the position of the most vulnerable in our society?

My answer, drawing from personal observation and experience, will have two categories: 1.) Canada. 2.) United States.

On another note, what I am interested to know is whether children & young adults find Rawls’ “difference principle” to be fundamentally fair or not. Will they find it necessary for the creation of a just society?